Upcoming Events

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants promotional image

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants

Friday, May 8, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

This new Obermann Center program offers modest yet swift support for those portions of research and creative endeavors by UI scholars that are important toward advancing a project but do not have enough funding from other sources. We will grant ten awards of $500 or less per academic year. Note that funds need to be spent by June 30 of each year.

Eligibility: Open to all University of Iowa faculty and staff researchers

Graduate students: Note that the Graduate College offers Small Grants for the...

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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Spring 2026 Obermann Writing Collective promotional image

Application Deadline: Spring 2026 Obermann Writing Collective

Friday, January 23, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

This program offers accountability to artists, scholars, and researchers working on any kind of writing project (articles, essays, fellowship or grant applications, dissertations, book projects, edited volumes, etc.) who want dedicated time, a cozy space, and a community for the practice of writing.

In spring 2026, four writing groups will meet in our Writers' Attic at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at 111 Church St. Each group will meet once a week for 1.5 hours, beginning the week of...

Nomination Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Achievement Award promotional image

Nomination Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Achievement Award

Monday, February 2, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

The new Obermann Interdisciplinary Achievement Award recognizes individuals or teams whose trajectories have engaged diverse disciplines to produce insights that would be unattainable within a single academic silo. These scholars cultivate collaborative work, fostering dialogue across academic fields and institutional units. Their research or creative work engages with foundational questions that resonate across society. By recognizing interdisciplinary excellence, the Obermann Center for...

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Fall 2026) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Fall 2026)

Saturday, February 14, 2026 (all day)
111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Fall 2026 Obermann International Fellowships. This program offers dedicated space, time, and funding for interdisciplinary scholars to collaborate on innovative research at the University of Iowa. Up to eight international fellowships will be granted every academic year. Applicants must be active researchers at an accredited institution of higher learning outside of the United States or independent researchers/artists with...

Spring Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Spring Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Book Ends—Obermann Book Completion Workshop supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist faculty members in turning promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants promotional image

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants

Friday, May 8, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

This new Obermann Center program offers modest yet swift support for those portions of research and creative endeavors by UI scholars that are important toward advancing a project but do not have enough funding from other sources. We will grant ten awards of $500 or less per academic year. Note that funds need to be spent by June 30 of each year.

Eligibility: Open to all University of Iowa faculty and staff researchers

Graduate students: Note that the Graduate College offers Small Grants for the...

News

We Did So Much Beyond the Home - Jeannette Gabriel talks about the Jewish Women in Iowa Project

Jeannette Gabriel, a 2013 Graduate Institute Fellow and a PhD candidate in Teaching and Learning, has been crisscrossing the state in an attempt to document a disappearing community. As a graduate research assistant in the Iowa Women's Archives, Gabriel is currently the backbone of the Jewish Women in Iowa Project. This special project was initiated by Joan Lipsky, a former Iowa state...

Kate Kedley - Building Solidarity Between Honduras and Iowa

Artists Take Back Public Space in Honduras As Obermann Graduate Fellow in 2013, Kate Kedley learned to frame research as publicly engaged scholarship, and since then has continued to look for ways to remain in solidarity with the communities and people where she researches. Specifically, her dissertation is an ethnographic study about education and teaching in the Central American country of...

Beyond the Shiny New Toy—Next Frontier for Digital Humanities

Last summer, a group of three scholars commandeered the Obermann Center attic for a month with the goal of pushing their digital humanities (DH) project into a new phase. The team of Blaine Greteman (English, University of Iowa), James Lee (English, Grinnell College), and David Eichmann (School of Library and Information Science...

Teaching Sustainability—Across the Disciplines

Teach-in Focuses on Sustainability Curricula Across Campus Across the globe, people strive for sustainable development, which the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development famously defined as a way of living that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” How can the University of Iowa campus address the great...

Marilynne Robinson to Deliver Lecture, "The American Scholar Now"

As part of the Creative Matters series, Marilynne Robinson will give a lecture titled "The American Scholar Now," on December 9 from 5:30-6:30 pm at The Englert Theatre. This event is free and open to the public. Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” She is the author of Lila, winner of...

2016 Graduate Institute Fellows Announced

Seventeen UI graduate students from across campus, representing four different colleges, have been selected for the seventh annual Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy. This year's co-directors, Craig Just (Civil & Environmental Engineering) and Jennifer Kayle (Dance), and Senior Graduate Fellows Anna Swanson (Cinematic Arts and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies) and Jessica...

Recent Events

Lecture/Discussion featuring award-winning Haitian writer Kettly Mars and Professor Nathan Dize (Washington University-St Louis)

Thursday, November 16, 2023 2:00pm to 3:15pm
Virtual

Lecture/Discussion via zoom featuring award-winning Haitian writer Kettly Mars and Professor and translator, Nathan Dize. Mars’s novel Je suis vivant (2015) and Dize’s translation I am alive (2022) will be discussed. This novel is studied in Professor Curtius's course FREN 4110:0001: Francophone Studies: Literature and the Arts: Haiti. 

Kettly Mars will explore how the 2010 earthquake in Haiti inspired her to write Je suis vivant. Nathan Dize, an Assistant Professor of Francophone Caribbean...

The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form, A Lecture by Adam Grener promotional image

The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form, A Lecture by Adam Grener

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building

Please join Adam Grener and the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio on Wednesday, Nov. 15 at 4:30 p.m. in the Franklin Miller Screening Room (AJB E105) for a talk titled, "The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form." Co-Sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the University of Iowa's English Department.

Our featured speaker Adam Grener is Senior Lecturer in the English Literatures and Creative Communication Programme at Te Herenga Waka –...

Smart Labor and the Fantasy Production of Association for Southeast Asian Nations Smart Cities promotional image

Smart Labor and the Fantasy Production of Association for Southeast Asian Nations Smart Cities

Thursday, November 9, 2023 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building

What’s so smart about smart cities? In 2018, the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) launched a program to transform 26 pilot cities in the region to “smart cities,” where services and productivity are enhanced by information and communication technology (ICTs) and new modes of governance. Santos examines these smart cities as assemblages of feminized labor which are digitally extracted and distributed from Southeast Asia-based workers to the Global North. Santos analyze how state...

Be on Point with PowerPoint — An Obermann Get It Done workshop promotional image

Be on Point with PowerPoint — An Obermann Get It Done workshop

Wednesday, November 8, 2023 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual

Do you struggle with how to create an engaging PowerPoint presentation? Are you concerned that your PowerPoint puts people to sleep? What’s the right balance of text and images? What color schemes work best? Come to this Obermann Get It Done workshop with graphic designer and scholar Jeremy Swanston (Associate Professor and DGS, Graphic Design, School of Art and Art History) to learn how to create effective PowerPoints for all kinds of audiences and talks.

Free and open to all, but registration...

Out of the Archive Film Series--Once I Loved: The Experimental Films of Edward Owens promotional image

Out of the Archive Film Series--Once I Loved: The Experimental Films of Edward Owens

Tuesday, November 7, 2023 6:15pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

Please join us at FilmScene this fall for a monthly screening and discussion series, Out of the Archive: Envisioning Blackness. A continuation of conversations begun last spring in the inaugural Out of the Archive program, the series showcases the vibrant, multifaceted tradition of Black cinema by presenting rarely screened and/or recently restored films. Tickets are pay-what-you-can (with students, in particular, encouraged to pick $0). Join us before each screening for a free dinner reception...

Places, Spaces, and Landscapes: Video Data Bank and the Moving Image promotional image

Places, Spaces, and Landscapes: Video Data Bank and the Moving Image

Monday, November 6, 2023 1:30pm to 3:20pm
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building

Representing the Video Data Bank, Emily Martin (Distribution Manager) will present on the history, distribution, education and preservation practices of the Chicago based video art collection which is dedicated to fostering the awareness and scholarship of the history and contemporary practice of video and media art through its programs. This presentation will also include a screening and discussion of a selection of works from VDB’s collection that respond to the following question: How do...